I don't understand how a movie can care too much about its characters, especially when you're going to be following them for three movies.
We're talking about one movie, not one third of one.
I am also more interested in characters who make choices than characters who are forced to do things. It's choices that make a character a hero, not being at the wrong place in the wrong time (or having the wrong family name in some cases).
It's choices under pressure that make characters compelling. Why do I care about Rey if she's so quick to run away from the adventure? She's gone this far then turns and goes? She obviously cares a lot about nonexistent parents that aren't ever coming back, but the film is so shrouded in mystery that we are given nothing to know why we should also care. I never believed for a second about how or why she cared for her family, the film is holding that in for what I expect is a plot twist in 8 that I don't care for anymore. There's so little pressure in that scene that it feels like a rote "Hero is reluctant to call of adventure" but it's too late. You say THE FORCE AWAKENS is a clone of A NEW HOPE but the "Reluctant to call of adventure" beat happens in the first 30 minutes not roughly halfway into the film. Luke makes the decision because of immense pressure - he has lost his entire family, family - by the way - that we were given time to see, understand, and empathize with. There's nothing waiting for Rey back home, except a possibility of the warmth of a family we never see.
I don't watch STAR WARS for subversive character studies in adventure films, I watch STAR WARS for thrilling plot-driven fantasy. If you want STAR WARS with extremely compelling characters, you should petition for Mike Leigh to make the next spinoff. That said, even by traditional fantasy genre terms, Rey is a weakly motivated character, which is odd since, yeah, she's supposed to be the de-facto protagonist of the film.
Jyn, by comparison, is at first, forced into this adventure, but when she sees the hologram that her father leaves her, she becomes emboldened to live for a real meaning instead of just drifting across the galaxy. Cassian gives her the cliched but needed speech where he says that the mission isn't all about her. It may be a bit of a weakness of the film to not detail this moment more, but the idea is conveyed - Jyn has been only thinking of her own survival, she hasn't been thinking of the survival of the galaxy. She becomes a strongly motivated protagonist, she becomes an extremist, a true hero, a real rebel.